or maybe it is, so many love poems keep appearing in the blogs. Love poems are some of the hardest poems to write, or so claimed W. H. Auden. Here are a few classics that have inspired poets and lovers over the years:
- The Passionate Shepherd to His Love by Christopher Marlowe
- The Nymph's Reply to the Shepherd by Sir Walter Ralegh
- somewhere i have never travelled, gladly beyond by e. e. cummings
- Let me not to the marriage of true minds by William Shakespeare
- The Definition of Love by Andrew Marvell
- What lips my lips have kissed, and where, and why by Edna St. Vincent Millay
- The Buried Life by Matthew Arnold
- A Birthday by Christina Rossetti
- How Do I Love Thee? by Elizabeth Barrett Browning
- Wild Nights — Wild Nights! by Emily Dickinson
- When You Are Old by W. B. Yeats
- Credo by Matthew Roher
A few suggestions: use concrete, specific images to show your feelings; avoid sing-song "roses are red" type rhyming; try to say something fresh and new that gives readers a new insight — or even a laugh.
And check out the following topics:
Poem #8: Tell a Story
Prose writers shouldn't have all the fun of storytelling. Sure, essays, short stories, and novels are where we expect to find stories, but poems also can tell stories effectively. From the earliest epics, right up to the present day, people have built poems from stories--sometimes fictional, sometimes true. Gary Snyder's "Hay for the Horses" is a poem that tells a story, as are William Stafford's, "Traveling Through the Dark," Robert Frost's "Out, Out--," and William Wordsworth's "Strange Fits of Passion I Have Known."
Read more ...Revise Poems
-- the no praise/no blame method
Revision means re-seeing — looking again with fresh vision at what you've previously made. And since we're talking poetry, we might also consider "re-auditing" — re-hearing — the words.
Read more ...Stanza Breaks
In poetry, stanzas are visual groupings of lines. A group of two lines is called a couplet. A three line stanza is called a tercet. A four line stanza is a quatrain, and a five line stanza is a quintet. Two other common lengths are a sestet, six lines; and an octave, eight lines.
Read more ...